The Texas Governor's Office includes several divisions and offices in charge of implementing the governor's policy visions for the state. As of July 2009, 278 employees worked for the office of the governor.

Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry is set to be sworn in for an unprecedented third term, and a good-sized crowd has turned out for the festivities (and free barbecue). Stay with us for updates from the speech and swearing-in at the Capitol.

As be begins his second decade as governor, Rick Perry's plan is to deal with the basics: to make sure the state is on a smooth economic path, to pass a balanced state budget, to coax the federal government into loosening its purse strings and tightening its security on the Mexican border.

Ever hear something about Texas politics or policy and wonder what it is? Or read something that made you think, "I have no idea what that means"? We're here to help. From questions about why Rick Perry is within his legal right to shoot a coyote while jogging to what the heck "chubbing" is, Texplainer will answer your burning questions. Today: "What's a Legislative emergency item?"

As a gift to Trib readers this holiday week, we're pleased to reprint Calvin Trillin's New Yorker profile of 1972 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Frances "Sissy" Farenthold — one of a dozen and a half articles and poems that will be published early next year in Trillin on Texas, a new anthology from the University of Texas Press. A staff writer at the magazine since 1963, Trillin has long seen the state as a rich source of material; elsewhere in the anthology are meditations on subjects ranging from Texas barebecue to the fictional film critic Joe Bob Briggs. He also considers Texas to be a part of his ancestral narrative, as several members of his family arrived in the United States by way of Galveston. "Yes, I do have a Texas connection," he writes in the introduction to the anthology, "but, as we'd say in the Midwest, where I grew up, not so's you'd know it."

For this week's installment of our non-scientific survey of political and policy insiders on issues of the moment, we focused on the budget. Specifically, we asked how big the shortfall is going to be, how the Legislature will close the gap and which areas of the budget are most likely to be cut.

Two weeks before Election Day, three Texas gubernatorial candidates debated the issues and made a final plea for support. As Ben Philpott of KUT News and the Tribune reports, one of them was not Gov. Rick Perry.

Gov. Rick Perry says there was "nothing untoward" about his friend and donor's company receiving $4.5 million from the state's Emerging Technology Fund without getting approval from a regional screening board.
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Texans weren't supposed to see Gov. Rick Perry's Sept. 15 schedule after all. The governor's office says it mistakenly released the governor's "political schedule" — as opposed to his schedule of official state business — to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White's campaign.

Six points separate Rick Perry and Bill White, but that's not all there is to it: The pattern of partisan preferences evident in the latest polling suggests that the Republican Party still holds a substantial baseline advantage over the Democrats in Texas.

Texas.gov, the state's clearinghouse for services like driver's license renewals and vehicle registrations, has launched a new page featuring numerous raw government data sets — including a list of foreign companies doing business here.

The start of the 2010 election sprint finds Texas Republicans feverish: Even the sober ones think they could snatch up to 10 more state House seats. Democrats maintain they can still wrest majority control away from the GOP.

The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has people thinking about whether the state and coastal cities are prepared for another big storm — especially with peak storm season again upon us. As Texas Public Radio’s David Martin Davies reports, there’s concern in particular over the sturdiness of dams.
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The governor depicted by Democrats as a coward in statewide newspaper ads last week doesn't seem nervous. In fact, as he traveled from Killeen to Temple and on to Texarkana last week accompanied by a reporter from The Texas Tribune, Republican Rick Perry looked comfortable, though he says he's taking his Democratic challenger, Bill White, seriously.

Over the past decade, the men and women chosen by Rick Perry to serve as regents of the state's universities have given his campaigns a total of at least $5.8 million, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.

When Bill WhitecriticizedRick Perry in June for "working part time" after his schedule for the first six months of 2010 showed an average of seven hours of state business per week, Perry responded that he doesn’t write down much of his work for the state. By contrast, Perry's counterparts in California, New York and Florida do write down what they do, and they make their schedules readily available to the public.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White is again attacking his Republican opponent, Gov. Rick Perry, for accepting contributions from political appointees — but the former Houston mayor is no stranger to the practice, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of campaign and city records. White has raised nearly $2 million over his years in public life from the people he appointeed to boards and commissions.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White is calling for an independent audit of Texas Enterprise Fund grants after documents showed the governor's office offered $2.5 million in state subsidies to Sino Swearingen, a company founded by Doug Jaffe. Jaffe is one of two partners involved in a controversial land deal that netted Perry a $500,000 profit.

Former Governor Dolph Briscoe, Jr., who died Sunday at age 87, was a genuine, intelligent and thoughful man whose hands-off style and moderate politics were right for the Texas of his time. So says another former governor, Mark White, who talked on Monday to Jennifer Stayton of KUT News.
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The Libertarian Party's gubernatorial candidate talked to the Tribune on Friday about why more Texans should be armed, why same-sex unions should be allowed and her admittedly slim chances of dethroning Gov. Rick Perry.

The Texas Democrats wrapped up their convention in Corpus Christi on Saturday, and the party's grass roots activists headed home newly energized to elect their candidates — including Bill White as governor. But as Ben Philpott of KUT and the Tribune reports, excitement may only be able to carry them so far.

Gov. Rick Perry's having knee surgery on Friday. In an e-mail sent out this afternoon, Dana Parish, deputy finance director for Texans for Rick Perry, notified supporters that a campaign event had been rescheduled because of the impending surgery.

Dr. Ken Ford and attorney Cathy Lockhart, who until recently investigated medical fraud for the state Division of Workers' Compensation, say the agency has failed to properly sanction unscrupulous doctors over the last half decade.

Former employees of the Division of Workers' Compensation at the Texas Department of Insurance say their higher-ups have failed to sanction or remove dozens of physicians accused of fraudently overbilling and overtreating patients, costing insurers millions of dollars. The allegations of stalled enforcement action have sparked an inquiry by the State Auditor’s Office, records show.

A multi-million-dollar plan gone bust? That's how our television partner in Houston, KHOU-TV, describes the governor's virtual border watch program, which has cost $4 million but has netted only a handful of arrests.